If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him

Finally, Siddhartha learns to be still and to listen to the river of life. Patients learn in the course of telling their tales that they can discover themselves by becoming curious about the other struggling human beings with whom they live in the world. The only times that we can have what we long for are those moments when we stop grasping for it

I try to be guided by Carl Whitaker’s advice to feed the patient not when he is crying that he is hungry, but only when I feel the milk overflowing from my own nipples.

There are no hidden meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained enlightenment, then a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, g

We middle-class white hipsters callously romanticized the Negro, just as the Marxists had distortedly ennobled the workingman. It goes on and on. Later generations of young pilgrims have cruelly used their own chosen noble savages. The Beats went on the road, glorifying the lot of the homeless without compassion. The Hippies took on voluntary pover

Too often the pilgrim lives as though his goal is to become the horseman who would break the horse’s spirit so that he can control him, so that he may ride safely and comfortably wherever he wishes to go. If he does not wish to struggle for discipline, it is because he believes that his only options will be either to live the lusty, undirected life

“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.”24 There is nothing to tell because the distinctions between things are illusions. “Truth cannot be taught … [because] the paradox of paradoxes [is] that of each truth the opposite is equally true.25

But there is an apocryphal interpretation of the myth of Creation, which suggests that Eve’s formation from the rib of the lonely, sleeping Adam, was God’s second attempt at finding him a helpmate. When God first “created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him,”4 at the same time, “male and female he created them.”5 An old Hebrew

If he will let himself get deeply into the experience of being stuck, only then will he reclaim that part of himself that is holding him. Only if he will give up trying to control his thinking, and let himself sink into his confusion, only then will things become clear.

And in this turning, we each must go as far as we can in reclaiming any part of ourselves that we have till then disowned.